How appropriate—how accurate!—her name is. It is more of a title, really, one she bestowed upon herself mere moments before she became so insanely famous. The Gaga half makes immediate, intuitive sense, an utterance that sounds like an infant’s first word but is, in fact, French and means, essentially, to be utterly enthralled by something—excited to the point of being touched by madness. (That it describes both the pop star and her uniquely obsessed fans makes it even more perfect.) But it is the Lady part of her name that has gone underexplored.

Put aside for a moment that she often appears in public with no pants on, or that she performs part of her show covered in blood, or that she screams like Sam Kinison onstage, or that she says the F-word with metronomic consistency. In person, she is unfailingly polite and surprisingly dignified. She speaks in the clipped, proper diction that is often mistaken for a Madonna-like pretension but is in fact born of twelve years of attending Convent of the Sacred Heart, the oldest private girls’ school in Manhattan, where Gloria Vanderbilt matriculated, an institution known for turning out self-possessed young ladies who speak perfect French and have the vocabularies of William F. Buckley, Jr. Indeed, what surprises me most during the time I spend embedded with the pop star—inside the giant plastic bubble, so to speak—while she is on tour in London and Paris at the end of December is how effortlessly she switches back and forth between “lady” and “gaga.”

It is a few hours before the start of the Monster Ball, the last of five sold-out shows at London’s O2 arena, and I am sitting in an empty lounge backstage, waiting for Gaga to arrive. The room—the contents of which travel with the tour (28 trucks and fourteen buses; 140 people) from city to city—is outfitted like a VIP area in a nightclub: low black leather sectionals, silver floor lamps, a stocked bar, a huge stereo system, and little black cocktail tables set with bowls of miniature candy bars. She is an hour late. Suddenly the curtains part and Lady Gaga makes her entrance, mincing into the room holding a porcelain teacup and saucer in one hand and a wineglass for me in the other. (Like fainting on command or dropping a glove, the long-lost art of making an entrance, which Gaga seems to have single-handedly revived, is a remarkably effective way to shift the conversation.) “I don’t like the idea of you having to drink wine out of a plastic cup,” she says as she makes her way toward me, one tiny step at a time. She proffers her powdered cheeks for a kiss-kiss as a bottle of Sancerre is opened, which she insists on serving to me herself. “Pouring your own wine is bad luck,” she says.

She is still in her day look: a slinky black-and-white striped dress—a gown, really—with a four-foot train and shoes that—do I even need mention?—make her feet look as if they are screwed on backward. The heels bring her nearly up to my height of six feet. (She is five feet one.) She has a Bride of Frankenstein updo, with a brooch perched on top. Gaga glances down at the bowl of candy on the coffee table in front of us, shoots me a look over the top of her granny glasses, and deadpans, “What, the Mars bars aren’t doing it for you?” I have eaten three of them, I tell her, and she apologizes profusely for making me wait. She then asks an assistant to bring us a proper spread, which arrives moments later and consists of enough filet mignon to feed twelve people.

Lady Gaga may be behaving as if she were a member of Marie Antoinette’s coterie—the powdered wig, the binding costume, the impeccable courtliness—but it’s a far cry from what I witnessed the night before. After catching her performance, I was ushered backstage to her dressing room and found a scene that seemed entirely unhinged. Gaga herself looked like a lunatic: Barefoot, still covered in fake blood, mascara running down her face, she was careening around the room in a robe made of red feathers like a cross between Alice Cooper and Big Bird. There were dancers running in and out, mixing and spilling drinks, and a peanut gallery of strangely bedazzled gay men sitting on the sofas singing “Adelaide’s Lament,” from Guys and Dolls, which Gaga joined in on when she wasn’t bouncing off the walls.

Gaga stumbled up to me to say hello and then introduced me to the guy she was hanging all over: a tall, boyishly cute heavy metal–looking dude with a mullet, wearing a sleeveless black leather vest. “This is Luc,” she said proudly. “He’s my boyfriend.” He looked down at her for a moment, and a knowing grin crossed his face. “OK, Bette Midler,” he said. Moments later I was ushered out of the room by Wendi Morris, Gaga’s road manager—in an effort, it seemed to me, to protect Gaga from herself. As I was walking through the curtains I looked back, and Gaga was in Luc’s lap. “Jonathan, wait,” she whined like a teenage girl in need of attention. “Don’t you want to stay and ask me some questions?” Obvious to everyone but herself: not the time for an interview.

What a difference a day makes. Back in the arena not 24 hours later, she is serene, sober, and sipping tea out of her fancy cup. What did you do today? I ask, and the answer is probably not what her millions of adoring fans would expect. “I stayed in bed all day,” she says. “I do this very strange thing with my foot when I am feeling lonely. I rub my left foot with the right foot. Is that weird?”

No, I tell her. It’s called self-soothing. A lot of people do it.

“OK, then. So I soothed all day.” She pauses for a moment. “In this hair. Because I actually wore this hairpiece out last night and then I fell asleep in it.”

And then you just got up and went about your day?

“Well, no,” she says, batting her eyelashes. “She had to be fluffed up first.”

Gaga can be forgiven for being wiped out. She has been on tour for three years without a real break, and on the road with the Monster Ball since February 2009. “Let’s call a spade a spade here,” she says. “I am really fucking tired. I am at that last mile of the marathon when your fingers and your toes are numb and you can’t feel your body, and I am just going on adrenaline. But in the overarching objective of my life, I am really only at mile two. I try to keep that in mind.”

If you have not seen Lady Gaga live, you do not know from Lady Gaga. In an arena, her music, which has often been dismissed as run-of-the-mill Euro-pop—somehow not edgy or deep enough—takes flight. It is as if each song were written for the express purpose of being belted—roared—in front of 20,000 people on an extravagant stage set with ten dancers taking up the rear. She manages to go from insane, over-the-top rock opera to syncopated dance routine to intimate, boozy piano ballad and then back again, through thirteen costume changes, without ever losing her total command of the stage. The fact that she has a huge voice, plays the piano and the stand-up bass, and wrote every lyric and melody herself adds to the sense that you are in the presence of a true artist who has only just begun to show what she’s made of.

Of course she’s comfortable onstage. She has been playing the piano since she was four and by eleven was performing in big recitals. As she puts it, “I was a strange, loud little kid who could sit at the piano and kill a Beethoven piece.” Still showing no false modesty, Lady Gaga says of herself now, “Speaking purely from a musical standpoint, I think I am a great performer. I am a talented entertainer. I consider myself to have one of the greatest voices in the industry. I consider myself to be one of the greatest songwriters. I wouldn’t say that I am one of the greatest dancers, but I am really quite good at what I do.” Big words from someone who’s only been around for three years. “I think it’s OK to be confident in yourself,” she says.

Her fans couldn’t agree more. They hang on her every word, scream when she screams, and dance throughout the entire two-hour-long extravaganza. At one show, I stood in the wings and watched as at least a dozen women were pulled out of the crush in front of the barricades and taken away on stretchers because they were overcome and near collapse.

It is no secret that Lady Gaga has an especially intense relationship with her fans, whom she refers to as her “little monsters.” She has said more than once, “I see myself in them.” Why is that? “I was this really bad, rebellious misfit of a person—I still am—sneaking out, going to clubs, drugs, alcohol, older men, younger men. You imagine it, I did it. I was just a bad kid. And I look at them, and every show there’s a little more eyeliner, a little more freedom, and a little more ‘I don’t give a fuck about the bullies at my school.’ For some reason, the fans didn’t become more Top 40. They become even more of this cult following. It’s very strange and exciting.”

Unlike the chilly, hyperchoreographed seduction of Madonna, say, or the manufactured pop of Britney or Janet, Lady Gaga’s performance style is raw and emotional. “I am quite literally chest open, exposed, open-heart surgery every night on that stage, bleeding for my fans and my music. It’s so funny when people say, ‘It’s amazing to see how hard you work.’ We’re supposed to work hard! I have the world at my fingertips. I am not going to saunter around the stage doing pelvic thrusts and lip-synching. That’s not at all why I am in this. I don’t feel spiritually connected to anyone in Hollywood makeup and a gown with diamond earrings on. I am just a different breed. I want to be your cool older sister who you feel really connected with, who you feel understands you and refuses to judge anything about you because she’s been there.”

Her relationship with her fans occasionally seems to verge on unhealthy, as if both sides were overly invested in something that in the end is impossible. I bring up a YouTube video that got a lot of attention in late November, in which Gaga is crying in an arena in Poland as she talks to the audience. “Sometimes, being onstage is like having sex with my fans,” she explains. “They’re the only people on the planet who in an instant can make me just lose it.”

When she talks about her fans, one hears shades of messianic zeal. “I want for people in the universe, my fans and otherwise, to essentially use me as an escape,” she says. “I am the jester to the kingdom. I am the route out. I am the excuse to explore your identity. To be exactly who you are and to feel unafraid. To not judge yourself, to not hate yourself. Because, as funny as it is that I am on the cover of Vogue—and no one is laughing harder than I am—I was the girl in school who was most likely to walk down the hallway and get called a slut or a bitch or ugly or big nose or nerd or dyke. ‘Why are you in the chorus?’ ” (She’s more Glee than Gary Glitter in some ways.)

For Gaga, the stakes are high. “Because as an artist and as a performer, the person that they look up to to create this space of freedom and escapism, I want to give my fans nothing less than the greatest album of the decade. I don’t want to give them something trendy. I want to give them the future.”

Not everyone gets Gaga, of course, and no one is more aware of that fact than the singer herself. As she puts it, “What I do for a living is not a cheese sandwich. It’s not like, either good or bad. It’s much more complicated than that.”

What no one can deny is her uncanny ability to mine decades of avant-garde and pop-culture history and twine them together in a way that feels like the future. She is a human synthesizer, a style aggregator, the perfect Wiki-Google-
YouTube–era pop star. Elton John calls her “the most adventurous and talented star of our age.”

Gaga herself is very open about her influences. “It’s not a secret that I have been inspired by tons of people,” she says, “David Bowie and Prince being the most paramount in terms of live performance.” She also seems to have made peace with the fact that she is compared to—or, less charitably, accused of ripping off—nearly every artist of the last 50 years. “I could go on and on about all of the people I have been compared to—from Madonna to Grace Jones to Debbie Harry to Elton John to Marilyn Manson to Yoko Ono—but at a certain point you have to realize that what they are saying is that I am cut from the cloth of performer, that I am like all of those people in spirit.” She takes a bite of filet mignon and says with her mouth full, “She was born this way.”

Lady Gaga’s new album, Born This Way, does not come out until May, but the first single, of the same name, is, by the time you are reading this, no doubt blaring from the radio. I first hear the song when Gaga, iPod in hand, gets up from the sectional where we have been sitting, walks over to the stereo, plugs it in, and then looks at me and says, “Are you ready? I don’t think you’re ready.” She turns it up to eleven. The song at first sounds suspiciously like a Madonna tune and then switches into something that feels a bit like a Bronski Beat hit and then finally transforms into its own thing: a Gaga original. Clearly an homage to the obscure underground disco record “I Was Born This Way”; it is an unbelievably great dance song, destined to be the anthem of every gay-pride event for the next 100 years.

She tells me that Elton John pronounced it the “gayest song” he had ever heard. “I wrote it in ten fucking minutes,” she says, “and it is a completely magical message song. And after I wrote it, the gates just opened, and the songs kept coming. It was like an immaculate conception.” She plays a few more songs and mentions a few others—with tantalizing titles like “Hair,” “Bad Kids,” and “Government Hooker.”

The second single to be released is called “Judas” and is, typically, a mash-up: The melody sounds like it was written for the Ronettes, but it is set to a sledgehammering dance beat and is about falling in love with backstabbing men of the biblical variety. Another song, “Americano,” which she describes as like “a big mariachi techno-house record, where I am singing about immigration law and gay marriage and all sorts of things that have to do with disenfranchised communities in America,” has a resounding Piafesque chorus. Turns out it was intentional. “It sounds like a pop record, but when I sing it, I see Edith Piaf in a spotlight with an old microphone.” (Piaf is an apt reference—they both evince a similar brand of heroic vulnerability.) But, she says, “there are some very rock-’n’-roll moments on the album, too: There’s a Bruce Springsteen vibe, there’s a Guns N’ Roses moment. It’s the anthemic nature of the melodies and the choruses.” She feels it’s different from—and better than—anything she’s done before. “It is much more vocally up to par with what I’ve always been capable of. It’s more electronic, but I have married a very theatrical vocal to it. It’s like a giant musical-opus theater piece.”

Troy Carter, Lady Gaga’s manager, tells me that she recorded the entire album—all seventeen songs—on the road over the last year and a half, “which is not the ideal situation for most artists,” he says. “But for her it was great because she was able to tap into the emotions inside of those arenas. We would have a conversation backstage about something, and the next day she’d play me a song relating to the conversation that we just had! Watching the creative process with her is incredible.”

Carter’s partner, Vincent Herbert, whom Gaga credits with discovering her in 2007 on Myspace, has worked as a producer with Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder. “She made songs that are going to touch people,” he says. “The song ‘Born This Way’ just takes your breath away. It’s like everybody from three to 103 can relate to that song. I think she made the Thriller of the twenty-first century.”

Gaga’s musical tastes are all over the map, which partly explains why she feels so comfortable in London. “Yes,” she says, “I have a very broad taste in music, and the English don’t differentiate the rock star from the pop star. It’s all the same thing.” But there is more to it. American music critics, for example, insist on defining her with dizzying numbers of pop-music references, but the fashion world sees something more precise: the influence of a very specific tribe of English eccentrics—Leigh Bowery, Isabella Blow, et al. “The fashion community in general got me much earlier than everyone else,” she says. “But actually, I felt truly embraced by this London cultural movement, that McQueen, Isabella, Daphne Guinness wing of the English crowd. I remember when I first started doing photo shoots, people would say, ‘My God, you look so much like Isabella Blow, it scares me.’ And McQueen used to say, ‘Oh, my God, your boobs!’ He actually grabbed both of them and said, ‘Even your boobs are like hers!’ ”

Like those style icons, Gaga demonstrates a commitment to outrageous self-presentation that makes every crazy costume worn by Elton or Cher or Madonna look like child’s play. (As Karl Lagerfeld once told me, “I hate average, and she is anything but average.”) But her determination to outdo them all, and herself, cuts both ways: She has been venerated and vilified for her fashion stunts. Some of her looks have been truly inspired (the red latex Elizabethan gown with sparkly red hearts covering her eyes to meet the queen), delightfully startling (the lace dress that crawled right across her face), downright silly (the Kermit cape), or simply mystifying (the meat dress). She clearly wants and expects a reaction. When she talks about her makeup for the “Born This Way” video, she says, “The whole world is going to hate it in the best kind of way.”

Picked up for a M.A.C. Cosmetics campaign early on in her career, Gaga has always worked both within and outside the fashion establishment, collaborating on the one hand with designers like Lagerfeld and Armani and Prada, and on the other with artists like Terence Koh and unknown up-and-comers. “I pay for a lot of fashion myself because I want to support young designers,” she says. All of her looks are filtered through the stylist Nicola Formichetti, who, along with the rest of her creative team, makes up the Haus of Gaga. Because Formichetti, who was recently appointed the creative director of Thierry Mugler, is in the midst of planning his first show for the house, I ask Gaga about it. “Our relationship does have some influence on the show, but I don’t want to take any credit for it. Nicola is fashion. He’s the most remarkable man.”

At the end of the day, the way she dresses is part of the entire performance-art aspect of her life. “It’s not about a choice,” she says. “It’s about a lifestyle that I live and breathe.” Does she sometimes feel misunderstood? At first she says no but then retracts it. “Well, yes, actually,” she says. “There is this assumption that women in music and pop culture are supposed to act a certain way, and because I’m just sort of middle fingers up, a-blazing, doing what my artistic vision tells me to do, that is what is misunderstood. People are like, ‘She dresses this way for attention.’ Or like, ‘Ugh, the meat dress.’ ” She rolls her eyes. “People just want to figure it out or explain it. The truth is, the mystery and the magic is my art. That is what I am good at. You are fascinated with precisely the thing that you are trying to analyze and undo.”

I am sitting in a vast suite in a very swank hotel in Place Vendôme in Paris, once again waiting for Gaga to make an entrance. Her road manager, Wendi Morris, is pacing around talking on her cell phone to Troy Carter. “I am not going to ask her that,” she says. “Not now.” Pause. “If you pay to have my head reattached to my body, I will ask her.” She laughs. It should not come as a surprise to anyone that Gaga is not always delightful. She is at the center of a complex multimillion-dollar enterprise that does not run smoothly at all times. Indeed, as an epic snowstorm was shutting down half of Europe, Gaga and her trucks and buses were trying to make their way to Paris. When the caravan got through the Channel Tunnel, the drivers were told that they would have to idle at a way station until the roads were passable. A couple of them decided to shove right on through anyway and were promptly pulled over, the drivers arrested. The quest to free the drivers—and, more important, the Monster Ball equipment they were ferrying—in time for the show to go on on Sunday night went all the way up to President Sarkozy. The answer came back: No. The Monster Ball would have to be canceled. Gaga, Morris tells me, was livid.

The door to the suite opens, and Gaga appears in a long-sleeved, high-neck nude-verging-on-lavender dress with a train, and a décolletage encrusted with what she describes as “pinky-pearly scales.” There is a diamond-shaped cutout at the cleavage, and her breasts—nipples covered with strips of white tape—occasionally make a surprise appearance. “You don’t even want to know what happened yesterday,” she says. “The wrath. It wasn’t cute. It’s not something I would want anyone to see.”

She seems a little on edge still, a bit cranky. “This is boring,” she says. “Let’s go get something to eat.” The security team is activated; the car is brought around. “I want to go out the front door,” she says to her security guys. “Say hello to the fans.” Are you sure? one of them asks. “Yeah, because they have been waiting. I think it’s good for them to know that I care.” She holds out her hand, which is nearly covered by a serpentine diamond ring. “I am going through an Elizabeth Taylor moment. Don’t judge me. They are all certified non-conflict diamonds.”

We head through the lobby, and I can see a barely contained mob of fans through the windows. “Awwww, see?” she says, as she approaches the entrance. “How could you go out the back when you have that waiting out front?” The doors swing open, and Gaga, surrounded by security, plunges in. “Gaga! Gaga! Gaga!” A teenage boy pushes to the front. “I am from Milano! Please! Please! Please!” They are all holding out a scrap of something to be signed or angling to get a picture. The crowd surges forward. A security guy yells, “One at a time! Take it easy!” There are girls with tears streaming down their faces. I almost get knocked over. Morris pulls me out of the maw and shoves me into the van, and the doors close behind us. But the fans do not give up. They are banging on the windows, pressing their faces against the glass. “They are so sweet,” Gaga says. Not exactly the word I would have chosen.

We pull away from the mob and head down the street, about a dozen paparazzi on motorcycles trailing close behind. “I don’t know if you knew this,” she says, “but the other night, in London, I had food poisoning. I was vomiting backstage during the changes.” I had no idea, I say. “Nobody knew,” she says. “I just Jedi mind-tricked my body. You will not vomit onstage. Because I was also thinking, If I do, they are going to think I’m drunk. And I don’t want them to think I am human, let alone drunk. I certainly wouldn’t want them to think I had something so ordinary as food poisoning.” She laughs.

We make our way to Chez André, and Gaga orders, in perfect French, escargot, steak tartare, and chicken. She likes her protein, this pop star. Moments earlier, when we walked into the restaurant, every person in the room stopped talking and stared, forks suspended in midair. Now, seated in a corner by the window, with a curtain that comes up right to the top of her beehive, I can see people outside on the street jumping up and down, trying to catch a glimpse. Let’s not forget that her first album is titled The Fame and the second The Fame Monster. “There is the fame monster, as you can see,” she says, gesturing outside, “but it also comes from within. It will only change you and affect you if you allow it to. You have to reject all the evils of it and try to turn all the positive things that you can use about fame into great things. Like Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Gaga used her visibility, her unusual connection with her fans, and her social-media prowess to agitate for the repeal of the law, tweeting senators, making protest videos, and speaking at rallies. “That’s me turning my fame into something that is positive and makes me feel good about my life.”

I wonder out loud how her parents, Joe and Cynthia Germanotta, have handled all of this. “It was hard in the beginning, but we have wrestled fame to the ground together,” she says. Gaga’s father, who was very involved in her career early on, had heart surgery a few years ago. “I obsess about his health,” she says. “I’m very Italian. I call him every day. I ask my mother if he’s been smoking. They are in their 50s, and they still live in the same apartment on the Upper West Side. Nothing has changed since I have become a star. I am a real family girl. When it comes to love and loyalty, I am very old-fashioned. And I am quite down-to-earth for such an eccentric person.”

One of the most peculiar things about Gaga is that for all the ways she’s transformed the pop landscape, she herself romanticizes her early days as aspiring musician Stefani Germanotta: “It was grassroots, downtown New York, blood, sweat, and tears, dancing, music, whiskey, pummeling the streets, playing every venue I could get my hands on. It was the hustle and the grind and the traffic of New York that propelled me to where I am today. I don’t in any way associate my past with anything other than the hunger and the starvation for success that I still feel. It was the most beautiful time in my life. And funnily enough, I still live in the same apartment, hang out with the same friends, drink at the same bars, and I dance in the same studios with the same dancers. Really, nothing has changed.” (Is it a coincidence that astronomically successful 20-somethings Gaga and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg have rejected much of the flash and bling of the boom years, live in relatively modest accommodations, and are very close to their families—or is there a new paradigm for dominators of the Zeitgeist?)

There are an awful lot of people trying to get in on Gaga’s creation myth. A mean-spirited book came out in September; an ex-lover and songwriting partner filed a $30 million lawsuit against her (later dismissed); and every bartender she ever kissed on the Lower East Side has a story. When I ask her about her life before she was discovered and signed to Interscope Records, she says, “My ride through the industry was an interesting one because people loved me but there was a very big raised eyebrow about me. I mean, a big one. So people were kind of like, well, I’m involved but not really. And as soon as I took off, it was like, I invented her, I made her, I wrote the music. When, in reality, I am completely self-invented.”

We finish lunch and head back through the scrum of paparazzi and into the car for the drive to the arena. She has a show tonight and another tomorrow, the makeup show for the cancellation the night before. Despite the fact that it is just two nights before Christmas Eve, she cannot bear to leave Paris without giving her fans what they have waited so long for. Her cell phone rings. “Hi, Mom! . . . Well, I’m, you know, I’m tired, Mommy. . . . Luc’s just kind of being a baby. . . . Were you able to find his earring? . . . OK, thanks, Mommy. . . . No, I’m OK. . . . I love you. . . . All right. . . . I love you.” She hangs up and falls silent. I check my BlackBerry, and when I look up, she is sound asleep. A few miles later, her eyes open, and I tease her. “My friends tell me that I recharge like a robot,” she says. “Jimmy Iovine, the chairman of Interscope, actually laughs at me: Whenever I have ridden on a plane with him I have fallen asleep, and apparently I don’t move. I sit in my clothes, perfectly still, head straight up, and I just sleep. And then I open my eyes and he’s like, ‘You scare me the way you sleep.’ ”

It’s so perfect, I say, for someone who likes to be. . . .

“Poised? As much as possible?”

Back in New York a week later, I call Iovine, and when he gets on the phone he just starts laughing. “Isn’t she amazing?” he says. “Did she take you for a ride? Isn’t that a great train to be on, being on tour with her?” And then he says this: “Artists like her are very rare. Artists that have that many facets of their career in line and can do that many things. She can write like Carole King, produce, sing like that, work-work-work like that. She gets her point of view across; she has the fashion, the performance—the entire vision. It’s very, very rare.” What does the future hold for Lady Gaga? “Only she can imagine it,” he says. “I don’t have that good of an imagination like she does. But she’s the real thing. She will go as long as she wants to or physically can. Her talent will take her as far as she wants to take it. Most artists of this caliber, if they can stay healthy, there’s no limitation. None.”